All posts for the month September, 2015

There were several pairs of engines that kept moving back and forth in the yard today. I think they were getting added to outbound trains, though I often see pairs of locomotives like this as having taken on a switching roll. They are too large to be switching engines, however.

As we continued our hike towards the Wall Street Mill (separate post coming soon), we found several more automobile carcasses. Unlike the last truck, there were little identifying features left on either of these vehicles. Also, we were beginning to run out of daylight, so we spent less time at either of these vehicles.

We took a trip to Joshua Tree National Park on 6/29/15. On our hike to the Wall Street Mill (I will have a separate post about this mill), we found several abandoned cars. In this multi-part series, I will show you the photos and what I’ve learned about each. I don’t know much about them, and almost all identifying features have been removed.

The first vehicle was near the remains of a house that had burned down. It was a pick up truck of some sort.

The vehicle had a straight six engine:

…and there was a serial number stamped into the side of the block that reads P247279:

…and a Ferro marking.

The top of the heads also had a serial number, though this one was part of the casting 525151-1.

It had a manual transmission; it felt like it had three speeds plus reverse. I could still feel it shift when I moved the shift lever around.

Just above the transmission on the base of the gear shift lever boot was the serial number 551922.

This tour was conducted on November 24, 2003, at Conbraco Industries, Conway, SC plant. The people in these photos were classmates of mine as an undergraduate in Materials Science and Engineering at Virginia Tech.

Conbraco did sand casting and ceramic shell (investment) casting. Of most interest to us was the investment casting, as this process is used throughout the world as a way to make a lot of parts with little cost.

Sturm Ruger was the first company to cast handguns this way, and the nay-sayers said that the handguns will be garbage. As it turns out, Ruger handguns have separate instructions for handloading (making your own ammunition), as they are STRONGER than other handguns.

The steps of investment casting are shown below:

First, wax molds are created. They had a machine that made theirs, and we made ours by hand. Once made, they were attached to a wax tree by means of slightly melting the wax.

After treeing the molds were ready to be dipped in ceramic. Here are our molds:

The trees were carried by overhead conveyor belt to the slurry machines. The object was to coat the trees in a ceramic that would be thin enough to capture detail, but thick enough to hold the hot metal.

The ceramic molds were fired to burn out the wax (hence the name ‘Lost Wax’ or ‘Investment’ casting) and to harden the ceramic shell. The preheat furnace takes the ceramic shell to around 1900F.

The metal is poured in at around 2800oF. Some of these pictures are from the sand casting line, but others are from the ceramic shell line. The ceramic shells are placed in a bed of sand and after the metal is poured, a chunk of hexane is tossed in and a hood lowered over the sand and shell. The hexane consumes the oxygen and reduces oxidation.

The shells are allowed to cool and then hit with a sledge hammer to remove the ceramic material. The pieces are separated from the tree and finished with a grinding wheel.

Random pictures:

*Note: I originally made fun of the above photo, not realizing how serious of an issue this was. Now that I know a little more about inert gas and confined spaces than I did when I was a junior in college, I see how serious this is!!!